Blood Eagle
by Raihu
Summary: Larxene x Naminé: I dare you to forgive me.


A/N - Uh. When I grow up, I want to be hardcore enough to make this kind of story actually, you know ... work.

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_Blood Eagle

Her chest cracks open wide, the ribs go one by one like jointed white fingers. Open to the air, her swollen heart inhales; expands; breathes out toxins.

"Ah," Larxene whispers, "I think I remember this part." She puts her fingers inside, touching things that don't belong to her. "Just like this." Her cruel eyes are brilliant, breathtaking. "I've missed it, you know; this." She moves, a velvety shadow passing across the smooth veil of the night, and her hands are a soothing weight in the greedy wound she has opened, pushes wider, and the words seem to emanate from her warm, slippery skin: _(Take me home, oh; just to see it one, only one last time.)_

Naminé hears, feels, knows it isn't something she can understand. She murmurs and hesitates. There's a question being asked, and she doesn't have any answers.

It's not entirely fair; Larxene's had so much more time. All that lifetime spent not-living; perhaps she's had enough, and with no better ideas in mind, decided to keep the unwanted seconds and minutes and hours and eons in a hidden place, a strange cage, and she's pressing them under Naminé's bones, working them into the flesh.

_(Wait.)_ Naminé thinks about saying it aloud. _(I don't want to live forever.)_

The white walls swim around her. Her body rebels. It isn't something she can understand, but Larxene says, "Ah," and then folds everything away - the bones, the skin, the dress - and though there's blood it doesn't matter. No one will find it. No one will see, because this never happened. She had to promise: this never happened.

This is a dream; no, she's not asleep.

This isn't a dream; she's wide, wide awake.

It's a drawing.

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__Always the same drawing every day now, sometimes just for a moment, sometimes long enough that she loses sleep perching over it, ghosting delicate invisible lines that never touch the page. A lonely page torn free and folded, pushed reverently inside the back cover of her sketchbook. When she wants to look at it, she eases her slender back into the corner and draws up her knees so that Marluxia can't see what she's doing. 

He asks her about it.

She says it isn't finished yet.

And though he could easily snatch at her twiggy arms until bruises blossomed from her wrists right up to her lovely, winged shoulder blades, and shake her, and _take_ the thing from her, he decides that he doesn't really care what the hell she sketches in her free time so long as she keeps painting long hollow corridors for the Keyblade bearer to haunt without purpose or direction.

And, really; if it means she'll be flashing her thin, white thighs at him a little more often, so much the better.

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__Larxene is alone in this castle, in more ways than one; she wanders its shifting passages, memorizes secret routes and shortcuts; she smiles to herself when they vanish, leaving her stranded. 

There's nothing new about that.

There's nothing at all, before or behind, there is only this isolated moment and all of its stale shadows, gaping at her like grinning mouths. She forgets the past, does not think of the future; she is a faceless figure in somebody else's nightmare, and the coming of dawn would burn her from memory if only there was a horizon here, or morning, or an adamant sun.

_(I don't want to live forever.)_

Larxene tells herself that she doesn't believe in nightmares, and walks out onto balconies that peer over the yawning, cavernous voids of unformed rooms. Alone in more ways than one, she calls half-remembered names to the darkness, hoping abstractly to hear a human voice answer among the echoes.

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__Though he plays the part of the painted jester in Marluxia's little court of insurrection, Axel is, in fact, alarmingly observant. During arguments and hushed conversations, he becomes a strange, agile creature, skirting danger as he takes in everything he isn't supposed to know; the hot glitter of his eyes is a threat, a challenge to everyone who thinks they have a secret: _did you know that _I_ know?_

Once, as Larxene was walking past, he put out a hand and stopped her with a touch she didn't actually feel and smiled in her face as if he was proud, as if he was protecting her from something awful; almost as if he could mean it.

He said: "Tell her she reminds you of _somebody_."

Larxene stared, then caught herself and offered an ugly little smile in return. "You want to save her, Axel? Go ahead and save her. But you'll be amazed when you see how little there is to ruin in the first place."

"Oh, I'm not interested in saving anything," he replied, standing arm to arm with her, and then he murmured over her shoulder, "I just thought you might want to consider being a bit more discreet. I'm not the only one who notices these things."

There it was, the hint of malice she'd been waiting for. She drew away from him without a word, and he gave her a polite nod before he left her standing there, drifting in silence, thinking about the many complexities of betrayal.

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__"If you," his eyes are terrible and wild, and he's never looked more gorgeous than this, never, "_ever,_" as he grabs her arm in one hand, her vulnerable throat in the other, "touch her," and he drags her away from Naminé's slim limbs and papery skirt, out of the room, into the white hall curling on like a bloodless vein, "_again_," where he slams her down maliciously and spits a mouthful of venom: "I _don't know what_ I'll do to you, but you'll _wish_ - _you _will_ wish_ - for the ability to die. Do you understand?" 

He's stronger than she is.

"Do you under_stand _me, Larxene?"

She could sink a blade or two into him, but it wouldn't be enough to make him disappear.

So she says, "Of course."

Marluxia coughs out a harsh, arrogant breath, the spurned lion with his lean muscle and magnificent mane, and begins to turn away.

"I can wait until she comes to me," Larxene adds, rolling to her feet, standing, staring him down before he can even turn to accept the challenge; _(because you are not the only clever hunter here.)_

He's stronger than she is, but it only matters when he has a hand hooked around her neck.

He pauses. Hovers like a shadow at the apex of her vision. His dark, delicate edges seem to shiver and blur, and then he steps away soundlessly, drifting out into white space, closing the door as he goes, cutting her off.

The last thing she sees is Naminé, peering at her without fear or malice, her glistening eyes an illusion of the sea on some faraway world where young girls sway along sandy, sunsoaked coastlines like tendrils of smoke, never realizing the value of knowing the way back home.

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__"I won't tell anyone," Axel says. "I probably won't even get it." 

Naminé pushes her toes together nervously, puts down her head, holds out the page folded over twice. Without touching her fingers - Axel believes in witchcraft, though as more of a disease than a practice - he takes it, unfolds it, examines it.

Besides the twitching of her feet, Naminé is very still.

Axel looks at her.

She keeps her head down.

He folds the paper along its old creases. Hands it back to her.

Leaves.

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__Naminé doesn't quite understand what happened. 

She felt herself controlled and controlling, pushed back, soft sides laid open, marauding pressure, the loss of something she didn't know she possessed and then the strange mourning for its absence.

She remembers closing her eyes, and seeing anyway: herself, lying flat, with the sides of her chest spread like bloodied eagle's wings opening to embrace the sky.

But there is no sky here, and it wasn't her ribs that were pulled apart, and she knows - supposes - that Marluxia saved her from something but she finds herself resenting him for it, which makes her realize that it probably wasn't for her own good.

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__Larxene isn't dead. 

_(Wait.)_

She is gone, just _gone_, scattered across the silvery slopes of distant beaches, buried in the forest, lost in the sky, and though Naminé finds herself imagining that maybe it's all for the best, she notices a certain kind of viciousness coming into the way she uses her hands. They are swift and familiar. They attack, expose, invade.

And they won't let her tear up that picture.

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__Roxas is the kind of boy who wakes up to get a better look at his dreams, who lives in perpetual twilight, who believes in things that don't exist, and it's not his fault that he doesn't quite remember anything. Feeling guilty, Naminé tells him that his whole life is hanging up in fragments on these white, white walls. He circles the room, concentrating, wading through smoke and all the memories he doesn't really have, searching for something genuinely familiar. She sits and watches him, waiting for the hoarse cries and accusations to rush together and crest and finally crash over her. 

He turns and looks at her. Says: "It's cold in here. Are you cold?"

There is a piece of paper folded on the table under her hands; Naminé strokes the curled edges with her slender thumbs. She nods, and Roxas walks over and puts a hand on her shoulder, feeling out the glassy bones that press through her skin.

He asks her about the paper in her hands.

And suddenly she is overcome with courage, and she grabs the paper, peels it open the way she would pull a barb from her skin, flings it onto the table and presses it flat so that nothing is hidden and then she thinks of wings all over again, huge dusky wings reaching for dark thermals. The white page is sliced down the middle, divided by a solid black spike, crayon layered and layered day after day, always a little larger, always taking a little more; only two thin lines of blank paper survive in the lower corners, and Naminé stares at them critically now, thinking that it's time to narrow them out.

Roxas lifts his hand away.

"It's nothing," she explains, putting it neatly aside. "Just a self-portrait. For a friend."

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__"Oh, don't say such childish things. Once I'm forgiven, I'll only do it again. Marluxia forgave me as much as he can, and here I am; and if you were foolish enough to do the same, well." Her fingers gesture and weave wonderously, tracing paths of confusion. "Understand? That's what people do with absolution." Smiling, Larxene touches the feathery ends of her hair. "Draw a picture for me, Naminé. I dare you." 

_(Just to see it one last time.)_


End file.
